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by hubraumhugo 413 days ago
I think you guys nailed the "selling shovels during a gold rush" as the biggest issue with LLMs currently is their reliability/hallucinations, not their capabilities. If I can use websets to back up LLM responses through your API, that's super useful.

Since you were part of YC 21, could you share a bit about your pivots/product iterations you went through over the last 4 years?
1 comments
willbryk 413 days ago
Mission of Exa has always been to build much better web search. The evolution has been:

- 2022: Consumer-facing embeddings search (back when we were known as Metaphor)

- 2023: Web search for AIs - once the AI ecosystem heated up, we made a business out of web search + crawling API. This is still our primary business.

- Now: Websets, a useful product built on top of our search tech

If you're curious, our company right now is fully devoted to:

1. Dramatically improving Websets quality

2. Building the best general search engine in the world

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gavinward 413 days ago
It must be heartening for a startup trying to build the best general search engine in the world to know that Google has absolutely no interest in competing with you.
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willbryk 413 days ago
Because Google makes money from ads, they're not actually optimized to build the best general search engine in the world, they're optimized to build the search engine that makes the most from ads, which is correlated with being a good search engine but not perfectly aligned. Our business model (paying directly for the search) incentivizes us to try to return the highest quality results, without any bias toward making money from ads. It also enables us to do things like pour a ton of compute/resources into a query to get the best possible results we can find, because someone would pay us a lot for that, and that's hard to do under an ads-based model.
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cannonpalms 413 days ago
Can you provide more information (or links) about that billing model you describe?

The incentive structure behind paying by the search has diminishing returns, as I see it. You need the results to be of a high enough quality to drive the user to want to run another search with you. Beyond that point, though, in the absence of a direct competitor, where is the incentive for you to continue improving search result quality? M

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